And we have our lists neatly listed out on our phone, ready to continue working with them.

Most of the operations on collections, such as sub webs on a web or lists or even list items in a list requires you first to load the collection like in the previous example (web.Lists.LoadAll()). The reason why I don’t load this data on first call is because I want to keep the data traffic at a minimum. Basically you load what you need and nothing more.

Next post I’ll show an example how to read list items, update the data and post them back to SharePoint using strong typed custom classes.

If there’s no error occuring and no data returned, it sounds like no connection is being made. If there was an issue talking to SharePoints web services, such as error in the XML or not reaching the server, an exception should have been raised.
You could use Fiddler (www.fiddler2.com) to sniff around on the network traffic and see what is being sent to your server and what is returned.

An easy check to see if the web services are accessible is to open /_vti_bin/Webs.asmx in your favorite browser and see if you get a web service description up. If everything looks ok, I would need to have a look at your code and see if there’s any issues there…

I just did a quick test on the site you linked to and got an exception right away. Thing is, even though you are allowed to browse the Webs.asmx it won’t allow you to call any of the methods without credentials. The credentials are posted on http://www.wssdemo.com and once I added those to the call, everything worked fine.